It’s not just you: TikTok and Snapchat are harder – or at least weirder to use than other apps. Open up TikTok, and a video will immediately start playing, a random teenager singing along to a pop song or mimicking a meme. How do you make it stop? Where’s the friends you follow? And what do you tap to get to your own profile? Open Snapchat, and the camera is open by default, the text overlaid on the image illegible if you’re facing a light scene.

That all breaks design guidelines and best practice. Apple’s human interface guidelines don’t specifically mention text overlaid on live camera video, but stresses “insufficient contrast in your app makes content hard to read for everyone”. Google, meanwhile, has an entire page about which colours work with which backgrounds. None of these guidelines must be followed, but choosing to ignore such advice is risky.

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“It just controvenes everything I’ve been taught and everything I practiced in my design career to date,” says Cennydd Bowles, a freelance designer who’s previously led the design team at Twitter, worked for the BBC and Samsung, and is the author of Undercover User Experience Design. While working on a client project in a similar area to TikTok, he conducted some competitor analysis to get a sense of what was going on. “They were just downright weird, some of these design decisions,” he says.

The most obvious example is the white text overlaid on live video. “That’s accessibility 101 – you have high contrast text so people can read it,” he explains. Other examples include icon size; Apple suggests 44 points by 44 points is the minimum tappable area. Bowles notes apps aimed at younger audiences often ignore this, including Bigo Live and, in places, Snapchat. “If you got given those in a portfolio as a hiring manager, you’d say this person doesn’t understand basic touchscreen usability,” he says.

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And then there’s navigation. “If you want people to open a menu, you put a menu icon there,” he says. “Obviousness is a design principle.” Some of these apps also use confusing custom icons rather than opt for built-in defaults. Bigo uses a planet logo to show members by region, which Bowles notes is “not a well recognised icon”. Interface guidelines for iOS, he adds, talk about the need for clarity and lucidity, “but abstract, essentially meaningless icons have become extremely popular".

Icons and text aside, the main difference with this new rule-breaking design is what Bowles calls the spatial metaphor of the app – essentially its structure and patterns. “iOS in particular has a quite rigid spatial metaphor. It’s a kind of hierarchy,” he says. Open a standard iOS app, and you already know how to navigate it without any thought, making apps easier to use. That’s not the case in this new class of apps, like TikTok, Snapchat, or Bigo. “They essentially throw all that away,” he says.

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Open TikTok, and videos from random users immediately start playing, with further clips uncovered via an endless scroll. Snapchat has icons to tab to the left and right, but it also uses a swipe. “These apps use a lot of on-screen swipes to navigate between screens in ways that classical usability people would say are completely undiscoverable,” he says. “You’d always want to have an icon or establish a special hierarchy or layout. They’ve done away with all that and it is essentially you play around, you swipe to find things, but we’re not going to give you a clue as to what they are and where they are, leaving it for the user to discover them by accident.”

None of this is apparently a problem for the millions of people tapping on these apps every day, and Bowles himself stresses he’s not criticising, merely noting a shift in design standards – though it does raise concerns with accessibility. “Users with cognitive impairments often struggle with unfamiliar icons or unfamiliar patterns,” he says, adding that smaller icons will naturally pose challenges for accessibility, too. Different design patterns can pose challenges for assistive technologies too; it’s one reason Apple and Google advise developers to keep to set patterns.

The designers behind Snapchat are aware they’re breaking with convention, says Jack Brody, director of product at Snap. “But the design choices weren’t made with the objective of breaking these old rules,” he says. “We made our design choices because we believe they were what was best for our application.” The app opens on the camera to make it easier to take a photo or video immediately, he says. “Snapchat is about creation first, consumption comes later,” he adds.

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“Our app is designed to present the functions in a most engaging, welcoming manner to encourage interaction and creation,” TikTok’s user interface design team, based in China, explained in a written statement. “As a platform that encourages everyone to be a creator, our main goal is to lower the barriers for content creation, from app design to the editing tools and filters that we introduced.”

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Bowles suggests the design decisions may also help encourage “play and serendipity” in apps that are used for fun rather than as purposeful tools, but there’s also a theory that such apps are designed to keep out older users. “The theory, which I think is somewhat credible, was that by creating this intentionally slightly hard to use, slightly obscure design pattern, young users weren’t going to be interfered with by parents joining the service,” he says. “Because parents are opening it up and going, ’I have no idea what’s going on here’ and quickly give up.”

While that may sound familiar, Brody disagrees, saying his design team aims to build an app for everyone, and figures suggest 60 per cent of its users are under 25, meaning there’s plenty of adults with the app on their phones. “That being said, I think in order to make our product accomplish that goal effectively, there are some UI and UX paradigms that might be more easily picked up by younger generations who have grown up with a device in their pocket," he admits. As Snapchat was mobile first, he explains, it was never designed for use on desktop. That led to specific design choices, such as using swipes and gestures, rather than inheriting buttons and menus found on desktop software. “I think a lot of the earlier companies ended up porting over desktop designs, and people got used to that,” he says, adding TikTok was also clearly designed for mobile first.

And then there’s the globalisation of apps; our own Western design assumptions aren’t necessarily held elsewhere. TikTok is a Chinese company, and Asian markets have different expectations of interfaces. “They look at some Western interfaces and think it’s empty and over obvious,” Bowles says. “They prefer a bit more density and vibrancy. So it might be that we’re seeing the collision of Western minimalist design aesthetic with a more vibrant and busy aesthetic from the East.”

A designer with years of training in best practices, accessibility and iOS guidelines may notice the differences, but Snapchat and TikTok clearly work well enough for their users. “If you offer enough of a sufficient upside, enough value and excitement, people are going to struggle through whatever design mistakes you’ve made and find a way to learn [an app],” Bowles says.

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Despite extensive testing, the last major redesign for Snapchat sparked complaints; of course, that happens with most noticeable changes to apps and online services. Brody says the core of the criticism centred on a decision to separate social from media. “We didn’t want your friends having to compete with celebrities and premium content for views, because it diminishes this idea that Snapchat is for your real friends first,” he explains. “Redesigns like this are often met with frustration, because these behaviour changes are hard for users. We also made some mistakes along the way. We broke some simple things, we made it harder for users to find their friends – that was clearly unintentional.”

The past year has seen iterative updates to the app to address those concerns, but Snapchat has struggled to add to its user base, falling by a million users to 186 million in 2018, though there’s nothing to suggest design choices have anything to do with those numbers. A company spokesperson said there’s been an increase in daily active users and average time spent in the iOS app since its redesign.

The popularity of such apps suggest that those various guidelines may need an update, or to be set aside entirely. “Perhaps there’s something to be said that we can relax a little bit about adherence to those design principles,” Bowles says. After all, early iOS apps looked like native apps they stuck so closely to the guidelines; they had to, as Apple was much more rigid about its design standards. “Gradually, it’s got looser and companies have started to innovate with their own patterns,” he says. “Nowadays, they [Apple] seem a lot more relaxed because they recognise it’s not hampering people’s enjoyment of these apps — and it’s good for the iPhone ecosystem.” The same followed with Android’s Material Design guidelines, he adds, with the initial narrowing of design patterns eventually relaxing.

Consider video. Recording video vertically rather than turning your phone horizontally for a wider angle used to be a mockable offense. Now, for anyone using Snapchat or Instagram Stories, vertical is the default format. “That’s an innovation that I think people often forget was Snapchat’s,” says Brody. “That is so much more natural on a mobile device.”

Bowles argues such rule-breaking innovation is good news for app design. “Maybe there is something to say that people like me – mid-career folks who are pretty sure that this is how good design is done – maybe we’ve been overly stringent,” he says. “Maybe there are new and more exciting designs or interface patterns that warrant a bit further exploration. I’m excited by it, a little bit worried by it, but excited to have my own preconceptions challenged. I think it’s important for a healthy design community.”

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The project Bowles is currently working on borrows some of these ideas – though he does adjust them so they better conform to his sense of good design. “I suspect it’s something I’m going to keep doing.” And others will, too. He predicts that there will be a backlash against the more rigid design systems in favour of more creative patterns and relaxed approaches in the next year or two. “And that sounds like good news to me.”